Amanda Harvey, Assistant Editor

Unmanned aerial systems are being implemented in a wide variety of applications. Two universities in particular are conducting research projects that deploy quadcopters to work with people and curb poaching in Africa.

Avionics safety certification – for software and hardware – is increasingly seen as an ongoing evolving process, reflected in the enhancements to standards such as DO-178C. This long-term understanding is enabling avionics experts to account for complex situations in certification standards such as the growth of multicore processors, avionics computing, and the role of safety certification in unmanned aircraft systems (UASs).

In this new University Update section of Military Embedded Systems magazine, we will be focusing on one military-related university project per issue. This issue focuses on the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) lidar project. The GTRI research and development program’s goal is to produce a smaller, lightweight, real-time bathymetric lidar that can be deployed on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rather than the heavy manned vehicles they currently require, cutting cost and time. In the following Q&A, we spoke with Grady Tuell, the developer of GTRI’s lidar technology and the principal research scientist leading the work. Edited excerpts follow.

Stringent size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) requirements out of the Department of Defense (DoD) flavor nearly every military platform, but the most challenging letter in that acronym might well be the "P." Achieving highly efficient power supplies and power management schemes in small form factors is not easy, but new developments in VPX, solid-state solutions, and smart power management are meeting and exceeding the DoD's SWaP-C benchmarks.

Several technology trends are driving advances in Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) payloads on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) – higher compute capacity, the growing use of VPX, and locating the processor closer to the sensor.

The transition to DO-178C continues to improve guidelines for avionics certification – however, big questions still surround the regulation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in national airspace and how industry and government will go about ensuring that these drones are safe to fly daily in the same skies as passenger aircraft.